HARBINGER?:

American conservatives went wild over the first post-election speech by Georgia Meloni, who is expected to become Italy's next prime minister. In what could serve as a manifesto of social conservatism, Meloni declared that the enemies of the family are:

[T]hose who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves ...

And so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity. I can't define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. 

None of this makes any sense. Meloni thinks she is crusading against what we call "wokism" by upholding the importance of "identity." But the rap against the woke is precisely their obsession with identity, seeking special protections for people who identify as members of various groups ("people of color," "queer," "trans" and so on). What Meloni seems to mean by upholding the importance of identity is that she wants to defend some identities--"Italian, Christian, woman, mother"--rather than others. It's not for nothing that contemporary national(ist) conservatism has been defined as identity politics for white people, a mirror image of that which it claims to oppose.

But what is more striking about this central passage in Meloni's speech is the weird combination of the conservative culture war and an anti-capitalist conspiracy theory about "financial speculators."

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